Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as '''Seneca, '''c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman,dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was a tutor and later adviser to emperor Nero. While he was forced to commit suicide for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, he may have been innocent. His father was Seneca the Elder, his elder brother was Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, called Gallio in the Bible, and his nephew was the poet Lucan. Tossup Questions # This man wrote an original Greek-style tragedy which opens as the ghost of Tantalus speaks to a Fury and involves the title member of the house of Atreus eating his children. He also wrote a satire in which Heracles defends a stuttering man in a trial before the gods, though that emperor is sentenced to play dice forever with a bottomless cup. This author of Thyestes and The Pumpkinification of Claudius killed himself in the same year as Petronius and Lucan, after his student accused him of a role in the Pisonian conspiracy against the emperor's life. For 10 points, name this Stoic philosopher who served as tutor and literary adviser to the emperor Nero. # One of this author's plays includes a passage about a second Argo sailing past the ocean's known bounds, which Christopher Columbus interpreted as a prophecy about the discovery of the New World. Another of this author's plays ends with a father attempting to put the pieces of his son's dead body back together after a messenger describes how that son's chariot was brutally attacked. Yet another of his plays depicts an unnatural grove as a locus horridus where Atreus kills the children of Thyestes. English revenge tragedies imitated this author's plays by being divided into five acts and including a ghost. He wrote "Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember" in his play about the madness of Heracles, Hercules Furens, and recommended daily self-examinations of a person's conscience in his treatise on anger, De Ira. For 10 points, name this Silver Age Roman author of bloody tragedies, a Stoic philosopher who also tutored Nero. # This man expressed his wonder at how people do not value what he believes to be the most precious commodity of all, time, in an essay that asked "Why do we complain of nature?" before extolling the vices of many of his contemporaries. He also wrote works addressed to Marcia, a woman who had lost her son, and to his mother Helviam Metrem explaining his exile to Corsica. This author of "On the Shortness of Life" and several (*) Consolations also wrote a play in which the title character, after being killed by Clotho, makes a case for his own deification, though he is eventually refused and escorted to the underworld. This author of The Pumpkinification of Claudius committed suicide following the Pisonian Conspiracy though he had earlier served as a tutor for the emperor Nero. For 10 points, name this noted Roman stoic philosopher.